Tired of being the grown-up in the room dispensing good advice to governments ceremoniously refusing to follow it up – think of the report on European competitiveness – Mario Draghi has evidently chosen to play Cassandra and announce the ruin of a continent trapped between the anvil of internal nationalisms and the hammer of external ones and destined to become the land of fortune of the oligarchs of global power.

The former Draghi certainly did not conceal the dangers of a Europe unwilling to make a turnaround that was as urgent as it was necessary in the new age of predators into which history has retreated, but the scrupulously ‘programmatic’ intonation of his economic reports lent itself to being misunderstood and evaded far more than the speech of dramatic prophetic urgency that the former ECB president gave yesterday at the University of Leuven.

Perhaps personal experiences also count in this choice, such as that of his twenty months at Palazzo Chigi, spent without practically leaving a trace in Italian politics (except, fortunately, the pro-Ukrainian posture) and ended without legacies or heirs, in a system that, after the 2022 elections, has almost perfectly returned to the status quo ante and has dismissed the Dragoan season as a technical parenthesis, closed with the return of the primacy of politics.

On the other hand, his alarms are becoming louder and more explicit because perhaps Draghi realises that he is finding, for the first time, ears capable of listening to them both in the elites of the so-called willing European countries and in a public opinion that is already constitutively transnational, in which the fracture of the Euro-Atlantic axis seems to be arousing a real political panic and awakening genuine European patriotism. After Trump’s return to the White House, everything is more tragic, but also clearer.

Three self-criticisms for ‘pacifist’ Europeanism

Draghi’s words certainly dismiss the nationalist illusion that the sum of twenty-seven crock pots, divided among themselves, can result in an iron vessel capable of guaranteeing the future and security of four hundred and fifty million Europeans. From the same words and for the same reasons, however, also emerge three criticisms, or rather three calls for self-criticism of what we might call ‘pacifist’ Europeanism in economic, political and institutional terms.

The first criticism concerns the dogmatic confidence with which Europe entered globalisation, persuaded that economic integration, even in the absence of a framework of rules and values shared between the various market players – both state and non-state (think of the digital giants, which control practically all the relevant information of all Europeans, bar none) – would still hold more opportunities than dangers, without realising that in international trade there were realities interested in using economic leverage as a tool for political penetration and domination.

We have finally discovered that not only first China and then Russia, but today also the United States think of economic relations as a continuation or anticipation of war by other means.

The second criticism, on the other hand, concerns the inescapability of a federalist approach to those issues in which European coordination of national policies does not produce convergence, but rather divisions and paralysis, first and foremost defence, foreign policy and public finance; this can only lead to the prior scrapping of any legal-institutional framework for reforming the existing order, which does not imply the formation of European sovereignty, which is the minimum and not even sufficient condition for real European independence.

A united Europe can hope to become a power and negotiate on equal terms with other world powers. In a disunited Europe, no country can hope for anything other than to find a generous emperor to be vassal to.

Out of the veto, towards a new Union

The third criticism concerns the hope, which we could call ‘vetero-federalist’, of evolving the current European construction, nothing and no one excluded, towards closer, federal forms of integration. Draghi does not say this (yet), but reality says it. The Union of 27 (and without the United Kingdom!), whose entire construction rests on the right of veto of each country on the most significant choices, will not give birth, but will abort whatever new federal Union is tried to fertilise and make grow in its womb.

The Defence Union, like the Eurobond Union, can only be built outside (and probably against) the Union daily threatened by the Russian-American political racket. This will not be a matter of constitutional engineering, but of political courage and imagination. The old West is no more, the new Europe is not there yet – and it is already late.